Lehi ranks fourth in “Best Small Cities for Families” nationally

According to the website NerdWallet, data was examined for 944 cities across the U.S. with populations of 25,000 to 75,000 residents to find the top options that offer the best combination of affordability, growth and prosperity, and family-friendliness. Lehi came in at #4. The three cities ahead of Lehi were: #1 Linton Hall, Virginia, #2 Little Elm, Texas, and #3 Leander, Texas.

Lehi was described this way: “Named after a prophet in the Book of Mormon and about halfway between Salt Lake City and Provo, Lehi sits on the northern shore of the freshwater Utah Lake. It’s a family-friendly city, ranking the highest in the top 10 and number three overall for the percentage of households with children, at 55%. Like other cities in the top 10, it has attracted a lot of new residents in recent years, growing 28% (to a population of 54,079) from 2010 to 2015. The city also is home to a campus of software giant Adobe, which opened a 280,000-square-foot location in 2013.”

Anyone who has spent time on Utah Lake, know that describing it as “freshwater” is a stretch. Also, Lehi’s population is closer to 61,000 according to most recent estimates.

Key takeaways from the survey were that the top places are close to big cities. Nine of the top 10 cities in the analysis are suburbs. The exception is Bentonville, Arkansas, whose closest big-city neighbor (Tulsa, Oklahoma) is 115 miles away.

Some of the best are in Texas. Four out of the top 10 cities are in the Lone Star State — suburbs of either Dallas or Austin.

The top 10 grew four times as fast as other cities. The population growth rate of the top 10, on average, was 24.5% from 2010 to 2015, compared with 5.9% for all cities in the analysis. Similarly, growth in median income for the top 10 grew, on average, at an 11.7% clip, while the average annual growth of median income of all cities examined was 2.7%.